The first day of Maker Faire was teeming with all kinds of robotic creatures and amazing interactive art installations. Here are some of our favorites, including the famous Cupcake Cars, the Electric Giraffe, a giant TapLight message board, and a head in a jar (a la Futurama)
More photos below the fold.
We had a great first day at the Maker Faire! Thanks again to Seeed for inviting us to join their expo booth.
More photos below the fold.
Dangerous DSO is a new logic analyzer/oscilloscope prototype we’ve been using in the lab. It combines a 16 channel logic analyzer with one 50MHz oscilloscope channel with +/-10volt DC range. The combined tool shows what your signal does between 0 and 1, which helps pinpoint noise and other electrical glitches.
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.
This week we’re giving away two coupon codes for the fee PCB drawer. Pick your own PCB. Facebook and Twitter PCB codes from last week will go out as soon as we’re back in the workshop on Tuesday.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week:
You can get the XC9572XL development board for $15.
Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: Pick your PCB”
The Bus Pirate is an open source hacker multi-tool that talks to electronic stuff. It’s got a bunch of features an intrepid hacker might need to prototype their next project. This manual is an effort to link all available Bus Pirate information in one place.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
This is an easy one. One click start’s Jawi’s impressive OLS client and anyone can point, shoot, and visualize a remote control signal. A more indepth demo could clone a signal and play it back to a second IR Toy.
We have a demo board for the Bus Pirate, a bunch of different parts that are easy to explore. It’s simple to demo an EEPROM write/read, etc, but it might be too involved for a hands-on display.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
The NYC Hackathon video is now streaming!
Around 500 hackers participated from late last night to early today morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, building in teams and waking up or popping enough Redbull this am in order to show off their hacks to notables including VC Jeff Clavier and Canv.as founder Christopher Poole, VP of Product Bradley Horowitz and Canv.as founder Christopher Poole.
This year’s NYC Hackathon was our largest showing ever, and what the hack teams came up with are about to be judged, American Idol style, on stage with each team given 60 seconds to present.
You can watch the judging until 3pm.
Via TechCrunch.
Connect an OLS to a device and record the output. Jawi’s OLS client is intuitive and easy to use.
If you didn’t make it to Maker Faire, you can check out today’s activities presented on the Maker Faire Ustream channel.
You can view the schedule of today’s activities here.
Ian Johnston wasn’t content to use the usual RC control joystick for his RC flying. He decided to reinvent the controller using a couple of old PC joysticks, an Arduino and the Tx PCB from Thomas Scherrer’s LRS kit.
You can read the details on this project on Ian Johnston’s website. He also has the entire project and code available in PDF form.
Frank Zhao notified us via the contact form of this project found in RC Groups.
Chris from PyroElectro has posted his plans for a 10-A H-Bridge motor controller that avoids using the the typical controller ICs. He writes:
Motor control is the core heart of robotics. Without locomotion or any movement a robot is dull and lifeless. The H-bridge is a tried and true concept for DC motor control. It allows you to move motors forward, backward and with varying speeds through PWM (pulse with modulation).
This tutorial will take a few steps back from the all-in-one L298 or LMD18245 motor control ICs and look more into how we can build our own H-bridge without the need of an IC.
Thanks Chris! Via the contact form.
OK, so it isn’t open source… but it is free (today only)! CNET is making available FREE downloads of PC Lock™ privacy encryption software for your PC. Just visit this link and follow the instructions. It will provide you with a free download and registration key. You will not be asked for credit card information. This is courtesy of CNET, and expires later today May 21, 2011.
The eight-core Parallax Propeller is capable of some pretty amazing things. One use developed by Johannes Ahlebrand is to emulate the famous Commodore 64 sound chip. His SIDcog V 1.0 code object allows the Propeller to accurately emulate an original C64 SID chip. With this code, your Prop can produce retro C64 game sounds like this.
Download the code object and examine the .spin files with a text editor to get an idea of what this detailed code can do. Sample programs are also included.
San Mateo Fairgrounds are buzzing tonight with the preparations for the Bay Area Maker Faire. Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at the setup and festivities, including booths from some of our favorite sites, interesting vehicles and creatures on display, and one exceptionally large batch of paella.
More photos below the fold.
We have a real passion for good Mexican food. Before the beginning of Maker Faire we took it upon ourselves to sample as many different tacos as possible from SF’s famous Mission District taquerias. We started at 16th and Mission, walked to 24th and all the way down. We also had our first celebrity citing – Mitch Altman, the inventor of the TV-B-Gone – while buying chili peppers at a local Mexican supermarket.
See all the deliciousness below the fold.
Every Friday we give away some extra PCBs via Facebook. The first few people who comment on this at Facebook get a free PCB. More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday. Sorry this didn’t work out last week, the Facebook plugin crashed on us.
This week we’re giving away two Dangerous DSO PCBs. Dangerous DSO is a new logic analyzer/oscilloscope design we’ve been using in the lab. Read the five part series about the design:
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:
Continue reading “Free oscilloscope v1 PCB via Facebook comments”
Facebook free PCB Friday is on the way. Don’t forget to share your current project in the comments or the forum.
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week:
Coming this week:
What are you hacking this week?
The internet situation pre-Maker Faire Bay Area has been pretty bad. Worse than bad. Today we’re in the conference hotel though, and there’s wired and wireless internet aplenty.
If you’re going to Maker Faire please stop by the Seeed Studio booth and say hi, we’re right next to the central Maker stage in the main hall. If not, stay tuned this weekend – we’ll bring you complete coverage of the Faire, and post all our Fair materials if you want to follow along.
First up, our Mission District taco crawl. We even met Mitch Altman along the way, designer of the TV-B-Gone (firmware also ported to the IR Toy). Look for that soon.
Here’s a good tutorial from ExtremeElectronics.co.in explaining the types of stepper motors, their uses, and how to interface them with an AVR microcontroller.
It includes the xstepper code library for use with the AVR Atmega16, and demonstrates how to interface the MCU and the motor using a ULN2003A high-voltage high-current Darlington transistor array.
This tutorial is comprehensive and provides beginners with the theory and sample code to get started with a simple stepper motor project.
